Just today someone asked me if I could help out installing Ubuntu on a friend's machine and teaching them how to use it coz they'd got the machine from somewhere with a priated copy of Windows on it. MS should be a bit careful...
Just because a very high proportion of Hydrogen in the gases near the Earth as it was being formed, it doesn't follow that the Earth's atmosphere was composed mostly of Hydrogen.
Hydrogen molecules can easily escape the Earth's gravitational field because they have a high enough velocity at normal temperatures, whereas heavier molecules generally don't. So you would expect to find a much higher proportion of heavier molecules forming the Earth's atmosphere, because once the Earth collects them and they tend not to escape.
The new finding is that the temperature in the early atmosphere was lower than previously thought, so the Hydrogen had less energy so it escaped less quickly leaving a higher proportion behind. Note that even this paper is only claiming "up to 40%" of the atmosphere was Hydrogen, much lower than the percentage you'd find in free space.
Slashdot Mirror
This is already happening with WGA.
Just today someone asked me if I could help out installing Ubuntu on a friend's machine and teaching them how to use it coz they'd got the machine from somewhere with a priated copy of Windows on it. MS should be a bit careful...
Some people are earning their living from it already, and Linden Labs seems quite happy with that. See http://www.odr.info/comments.php?id=1511_0_1_0_C
Just because a very high proportion of Hydrogen in the gases near the Earth as it was being formed, it doesn't follow that the Earth's atmosphere was composed mostly of Hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules can easily escape the Earth's gravitational field because they have a high enough velocity at normal temperatures, whereas heavier molecules generally don't. So you would expect to find a much higher proportion of heavier molecules forming the Earth's atmosphere, because once the Earth collects them and they tend not to escape. The new finding is that the temperature in the early atmosphere was lower than previously thought, so the Hydrogen had less energy so it escaped less quickly leaving a higher proportion behind. Note that even this paper is only claiming "up to 40%" of the atmosphere was Hydrogen, much lower than the percentage you'd find in free space.